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Torture and Police Reparations
This week, the city of Chicago has approved a reparations package that will supply money and benefits to men with credible claims to have been tortured by the “Midnight Crew” of Police Commander John Burge. Burge appears to have used suffocation, electrical shocks, and Russian roulette-style “fake executions” to force confessions out of more than 200 people in the ’70s and early ’80s.
The department fired him in 1993, and a 2002 investigation turned up serious evidence of abuse. Burge wasn’t charged because the statute of limitations had elapsed on his offenses. However, he did serve four and a half years for perjury and obstruction of justice (relating to a civil suit filed against him) and was only recently released. He’s currently drawing a police pension.
What do we think of all this? To me it seems pretty clear that Burge’s tactics were far beyond the range of acceptable police behavior. Whether or not you would classify his “Midnight Crew’s” activities as torture (which I think we plausibly should), using “extreme interrogation tactics” to coerce confessions is obviously unjust. It’s somewhat interesting that the settlement offered by the city is relatively small ($5.5 million) in comparison to the costs already incurred from related judgments and legal costs, and also that it also includes provisions for counseling, job training and other services for victims. (They’re also erecting a monument. Hmm.)
With today being the 23rd anniversary of the start of the 
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. – James Madison, Federalist 51
If you’re conservative (and you are, if you’re reading this), you’ve heard the general narrative on the decline of culture in urban centers from individuals like the 
I’ll admit this much up front: I’m not a gun person. I’ve tried to like guns. Some of my favorite people are gun nuts, so I’ve been treated to long disquisitions on the virtues of different kinds and calibers and sat through long debates on the merits of the Glock this and the Winchester that.
Though it has scarcely garnered the attention it deserves, the U.S. Department of Justice has released a report exonerating Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown last year in Ferguson, Missouri. As I note in 
I have a peculiar area of expertise: I know a lot about death. Well, more precisely, I know more than the average person about bereavement, especially sudden, violent bereavement. I have come by this through my own losses, dedicated study, and, especially, through nearly 15 years of experience as a law enforcement chaplain. Law enforcement officers often have the sad duty of performing what is known as “death notification,” and it is one they gladly hand off to the chaplain whenever possible. It is one of the subjects I teach at our academy.
It seems that hardly a week goes by without a new story of a seemingly unwarranted police shooting, mistaken arrest, wrongful prosecution, or wrongful conviction making the news. We have had a rather fierce debate here on Ricochet about whether the police are out of hand, going back years in some cases. It’s not like we are starved for examples, whether they are SWAT raids gone awry, armed interventions to euthanize a deer, traffic stops where the officers seem to have overreacted, and so on.
